Mixing mainstream and mature marketing, because it's all good ~ or dirty, depending on who's judging.

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Monthly Archives: March 2014

With the number of advertising programs that limit or down-right prevent adult products, services, and websites from participating, I’m often asked about just where adult businesses can advertise online. Today, I’d like to discuss two of them. However, before we get into advertising, there are some simple facts you should know about advertising as it pertains to this article.

1) Advertising is one of the marketing tools at your disposal. It should not be the only one used, nor should it be ignored; advertising is part of your marketing mix.

2) Advertising should primarily be considered in terms of paid options for promoting your business ~ which means it should be continually be examined in terms of ROI and remain part of your businesses budget.

3) Advertising online is one way to generate traffic to your website, leads for your online business, and branding for your website. Since these ads link to your site, it is imperative that your site be ready for visitors. That means you shouldn’t bother to pay for any advertising (or do any promotions, really) until your website is completed and ready for potential customers. Bringing folks to unfinished and/or poorly designed websites only serves to provide bad impressions ~ impressions which last long after your website is fixed. In fact, many visitors who remember visiting your “bad” website may recognize your ad and avoid visiting you again in the future ~ which means they won’t click your ad again to see what you’ve fixed. So do not bother to promote your site until it is ready.

4) There are some online advertising terms you should know: click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), cost per impression (CPM). Most ad networks will do the math for you and provide statistics, as shown below. However, you should understand what they mean ~ and how they might differ across various markets, networks, countries, etc. Also, it is imperative that you note how advertising works: Impressions matter. A commercial on television doesn’t make you get up from your Lazy-Boy and dash to the grocers for a bag of Cheetos; nor is it designed to. Ads are to help build awareness ~ so that the next time you are at the grocers you have Cheetos on your mind. Ditto online ads. Only with online ads, they can remain in their Lazy-Boy and surf to meet their needs and desires.

A Tale Of Two Adult Advertising Networks

Juicy Ads

Juicy Ads is one of the oldest online ad networks working with both adult and mainstream sites ~ and the two areas are not split apart, which means you can search for and buy ads on adult and mainstream sites at the same time. That is important for a lot of businesses.

JuicyAds also sells pop-under ads and mobile traffic, but I’ll be focusing on Direct Buy ads.

Direct Buy JuicyAds are sold by length of time: one week, two weeks, one month and you can opt to have the auto-renew or not.

The interface can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but that’s because there are a lot of options. You can narrow your search by price, niche, website type, ad size, country ~ and even do keyword searches, narrowing the results by the aforementioned options. Click the image to see the options.

Once you receive the list of options, you can sort by number of impressions, clicks, price, and Google and Alexa rankings. You can sort from highest to lowest, and vice versa, to refine options you want.

JuicyAds focus offers mainly image ads, buttons and banners (sometimes animated images as well), some of which are quite small (125 x 125 pixels), with a single line of text, as seen here (example from my site, Sex Kitten).

Since images are the focus, it is important to create great graphics. You’ll probably want to test a few images to see which perform best.

As mentioned, JuicyAds will provide statistics for CTR, CPC, and CPM. You can see from the stats shown here, this particular JuicyAds campaign has a lot of impressions, but a rather low click through rate, resulting in lots of viewers being shown the ad, but few visits to the site. While the CTR may seem low, I can tell from my monitoring my other site statistics how long those visitors referred from JuicyAds stay on the site, etc. And, again, there are those impressions ~ which I hope are leaving positive impressions on those who see them.

For those with deeper pockets, and more certainty about investing in advertising, there are also Juicy Network Ads. Also called “Filler Ads”, these are ads which are shown throughout the network. Rates available upon request (quote), but the minimum deposit required to start such campaigns is $250. These are available in banner ads, pop-unders, and mobile versions.

Another fact worthy of mention: JuicyAds is the only 6-time award winning ad network in the adult industry, recognized by YNOT, GFY, and XBIZ.

The best things about JuicyAds:

* Ability to reach mainstream and adult sites.

* Many options; easy sorting.

* Instant ads; using Direct Buy ads at Juicy means you can have your ads up in seconds.

* Ability to edit ad while it is running.

* Low investment. You can actually find ads for under a dollar, so you ought to be able to both start advertising as well as find inexpensive ways to test your ads within any budget.

* If ad spaces you desire are sold out, you still have options. One, you can create a watch list to monitor when there are available spots; two, you can try to out-bid to get the space.

Blog Ads

BlogAds is another ad network which allows you to reach mainstream and adult sites for advertising, all from one login ~ however, adult ads are not always accepted. Read on to find out what you need to know.

The BlogAds network consists primarily of blogs. The online ad network was founded with the idea of politics in mind. Not only political blogs, but blogs willing to promote candidates and issues during elections. Given the large number of liberal blogs which are sex positive and open to sexuality, finding space for your adult advertising is more than just “possible”. (More details to come ~ just hold on!)

BlogAds are also sold for a period of time: a week, two weeks, a month, three months. And they can be scheduled ahead of time for use in book launches,events, and the like.

There are other ad options, including banners, video, flash, skins, etc. But I will be focusing on the standard BlogAds.

These standard BlogAds look like miniature blog posts, complete with images, text, and links. Yes, multiple links! Link to your main URL, link to specific products and services, link to your “about page” or FAQ, link to your social media profiles, link to your sex worker profile at another site ~ all within the same ad.

You can jazz-up your ad’s text, using italics & making it bold. You even have a “Tweet” option you can use, and edit, at no extra charge. And there are several sizes to choose from as well.

Here’s an example of BlogAds (again, from Sex Kitten).

You can search for advertising options (more on that in a minute), but you must begin with your ad type (size) and duration (how long you want the ad to run) before you can actually get to really searching for results that you can “toggle” to accept and pay for. That’s probably the most annoying thing about BlogAds.

You can search BlogAds for sites based on keywords, like “sex”, and use the advanced sorting option to sort advertising space by ad size, price, various demographics (including age and gender), and by politics, of course. But perhaps the most useful place to begin is with the niches.

The niches, called “hives”, are groups of like-minded blogs and bloggers. You can search within hives as well. Here are some of the hives with members which I’ve found are open to advertising from adult websites:

Ads submitted are manually reviewed by the bloggers themselves. Should your ad be rejected, you may be able to converse about what changes you might make to your ad in order to get it accepted. But, again, not all sites (especially the conservative ones) will accept adult or even risque ads. Typically, you will find out if your ad has been accepted or rejected in 24 hours.

BlogAds will also provide you stats for your advertising campaigns. You will see impressions, clicks, number of Tweets, etc. both in a quick overview format and with individual pages with detailed reports as shown here:

The CTR rates are generally much higher at BlogAds. Likely this has to do with the more generous (blog-like) advertising and, in my opinion, is a bit more selective in terms of accepting blogs into the advertising network. However, that comes at a price; BlogAds are not as inexpensive to start. The cost per click average etc. may make BlogAds cheaper than JuicyAds ~ but there are no $1 ad campaigns at BlogAds.

The best things about BlogAds:

* Ability to reach mainstream and adult sites.

* Ability to have more than one link in your ad.

* Ability to edit ad while it is running.

* Allows for people to tweet your ad.

* Ability to create text only ads.

* Incredibly high CTRs.

Summation

If you are looking to give online advertising a try for your adult website, I highly recommend both sites. If you are leery about investing in advertising, you may want to being with JuicyAds first. Not only is it a minimal cash output, but the low investment means you can easily test different graphics. Once you’ve found some graphics that work, you can put them to use in bigger buys at JuicyAds or feel better about investing with BlogAds.